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4 
ADDRESS. 
_ progress made in different departments of science, with whicu we have 
_ often been presented at our annual gatherings. On the other hand, those 
men, from time to time selected to fill the distinguished office of President, 
; whose lives have been mainly devoted to the practical utilisation of the 
results of scientific research, and to the extension in particular directions 
of the consequent resources of civilisation, seize with keen pleasure the 
? opportunity afforded them of directing attention to the triumphs achieved 
in the application, to the purposes of daily life, of the great scientific 
_ truths established by such illustrious labourers in the fields of pure science 
as Newton, Dalton, Faraday, and Joule. The wide and constantly-ex- 
_ tending domain of applied science presents, even to the superficial observer, 
a continually varied scene; not a year passes but some great prize falls 
to the lot of one or other of its explorers, and some apparently insignifi- 
cant vein of treasure, struck upon but a few years back, is rapidly opened 
out by cunning explorers, until it leads to a mine of vast wealth, from 
which branch out in many directions new sources of power and might. 
Among the branches of science in the practical applications of which 
the greatest strides have been made since the Association met at Leeds 
in 1858 is electricity.. That year witnessed the accomplishment of the 
first great step towards the establishment of electrical communication 
between Europe and America, by the laying of a telegraph-cable con- 
necting Newfoundland with Valencia. Through this cable a message of 
thirty-one words was shortly afterwards transmitted in.thirty -five minutes; 
an achievement which, though exciting great enthusiasm at the time, 
searcely afforded promise of the succession of triumphs in ocean tele- 
graphy which have since surpassed the wildest dreams of the pioneers in 
the realms of applied electricity. 
The development of the electric telegraph constitutes a never-failing 
subject of the liveliest interest. The experiments made by Stephen 
Gray, in 1727, of transmitting electrical impulses through a wire 700 
feet long ; by Watson, twenty years afterwards, of transmitting frictional 
electricity through many thousand feet of wire, supported by a line of 
poles, on Shooter’s Hill, in Kent; and by Franklin, who carried out a 
similar experiment at Philadelphia,—although they were followed by many 
other interesting and philosophical applications of frictional electricity to 
the transmission of signals—were not productive of really practical results. 
The work of Galvani and of Volta was more fruitful of an approach to 
practical telegraphy in the hands of Sémmering and of Coxe, while the 
researches of Oersted, of Ampere, of Sturgeon, and of Ohm, and espe- 
cially the discoveries of volta-electric induction and magneto-electricity 
by Faraday, paved the way for the development of the electric telegraph 
as a practical reality by Cooke and Wheatstone in 1837. How remarkable 
the strides have been in the resources and powers of the telegraphist since 
that time is demonstrated by a few such facts as these: the first needle- 
instrument of Cooke and Wheatstone transmitted messages at ihe rate of 
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